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Comment by hgsgm | Hacker News Reader

Comcast/Xfinity is a criminal organization. Hasn't changed. Don't give the your money.

When's the last time an honest, reputable business changed its name? I've seen name changes in restaurants, social networks, apartment buildings, duct cleaning scammers, and it's never for a good reason.

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The problem is that it's often the only choice. ISPs often have a monopoly over their territory.

I moved a mile away from my old house and had to switch cable providers. I preferred the old one, but apparently I crossed the boundary.

Interestingly... in the UK... they did something similar to the DSL Provider / ISP split we did here in the states. So you could order cable service from one company and layer 3 from a completely different company. People tell me it's done wonders for competition there.

Well yes. Openreach were fixing a problem with my phone like yesterday, that’s generally a monopoly.

My layer 3 service is from A&A, which suits my needs. Other people probably wouldn’t want to chat with the engineers on IRC when there’s a problem though so they would go with talk talk or Bt or whatever.

Oh man. I would have LOVED to be able to talk to Lumen engineers via IRC a couple years ago. It took about 4 1/2 months to work through the army of script-reading CS reps to get to a manager who agreed to let me talk to a tier-2 rep who immediately put me in the queue for a callback from an engineer. Within 5 minutes of talking with THAT engineer, they had enough info to realize someone had mis-keyed my account number in one of their internal tools. It took another five minutes for them to correct it and within an hour my intarwebs were working fine. I suspect that had I been able to talk to a tier-2 engineer (even if via IRC) it would have taken at most a day to resolve.

Sadly a lot of people in the U.K. want to remove that choice and just have a one sized fits all shit solution

Yeah, just sign up with a different provider rather than the one that enjoys a monopoly over your home.

Well there was the time Facebook changed its name to Meta... oh wait... that's probably a bad example.

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